The Chinese government has been busy whipping up a nationalist furor over a new Japanese textbook that does not deal adequately with the “Rape of Nanjing,” a 1937 massacre that claimed as many as 300,000 lives.

On Saturday, as many as 20,000 anti-Japanese protesters in China became violent, shouting anti-Japanese slogans, attacking the country’s consulate and vandalizing cars and businesses. Police stood by as the mob surged.

The protests have been going on for three weeks, and the Chinese government is demanding that Japan “face up to history.”

Japan has had problems in that area. The atrocities of the World War II era have been difficult to reconcile with the country’s pacifist constitution, which developed after the end of hostilities. Imperial Japan was often a brutal and repressive occupier, which used the population of China and Korea as slave laborers and forced prostitutes. Still today, after more than half a century, Japanese leaders have difficulty dealing with the country’s past. Politicians must walk a fine line in honoring the country’s war dead while denouncing the crimes some of them committed.

But when it comes to facing up to history, China offers no good example. Many schoolchildren in the communist country do not learn about the 1989 murder of democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square by government forces. Nor do they hear about the cultural purges of Mao or the ongoing occupation – and attempts to destroy the culture – of Tibet.

History in China is pliable. It is bent and contorted to fit the agenda of the totalitarian, ruling Communist Party.

Japan – like Germany – must constantly work to come to terms with the crimes in its past. But the ongoing actions of China deserve more attention and scrutiny than a few lines in a single textbook.